His Stolen Bride

by Judith Stanton

  His earnest entreaty touched her heart. She could not hold back as she ought. “You showed me the watches, placed them in the vault, then pocketed the key. I thought nothing of it. After you left I showed my father the case and found it empty. He was furious, instantly convinced you were at fault. I told him what I saw that night, but he stuck to his conclusion. Nothing I said could persuade him otherwise.”

  His great hand grasped her small one. “What exactly did you tell your father, Abbigail? Surely nothing of what passed between us that night.”

  She lifted her chin. “I told him you came home and found me crying. You were distracted by my distress. Enough to have misplaced the watches. Enough perhaps–as you left in haste-to have mistakenly packed them with your things.”

  A slight tightening of Nicholas’s hand on hers was the only sign of his disapproval. “I did not, Abbigail. We looked everywhere. And today, I searched some more. I must have left the watches in the safe.”

  “You couldn’t have. They were not there.”

  “They are not here. They’re too large to lose. And they didn’t get up and walk off.”

  “I distracted you that night. And so I shall tell them.”

  “Don’t do it, Abbigail,” he warned. Entreated.

  “But it’s the truth.”

  “What if I did steal them? That could be the truth.”

  She stamped her foot. “Rubbish.”

  A grin spread across his face. “I appreciate the confidence.”

  His gratitude warmed her. Charmed her. She grinned back. “You are welcome. That confidence and my confession will prove your innocence to the Elders.”

  In a flash, he was solemn. “No, Abbigail. Think of it from their perspective. Just because they didn’t find the watches, doesn’t mean I didn’t steal and sell them. My innocence cannot be proved, no matter what you say. You must not defend me. I do not need your help. Whatever happens, I can take it. I have been in trouble all my life.”

  “I will be sworn to tell the truth. How do you propose to stop me from doing that? You were distracted that night. I distracted you. If you did not pack the watches inadvertently, you probably misplaced them somewhere we failed to look.”

  “Damn the watches to perdition!” Nicholas cursed. “’Tis not about the watches. ‘Tis about you and your reputation. As much as I appreciate your trust, you must not even hint at what happened between us that night. Already there are rumors.”

  She cocked her head in doubt. “Rumors about what?”

  “About us. You and me. Rumors that your father brought you here thinking we were … involved. Your reputation is at stake.”

  She gave a feminine snort of exasperation. “My reputation means nothing to me. What has it gained me but a marriage proposal from a man I can’t abide?”

  Worry prickled down his spine. Wrapped up in his own woes, he hadn’t thought of that. “You refused him, I hope,” he said as evenly as he could.

  “The man dips snuff,” she said with bright vehemence. “It spots his shirts. Shirts that I would have to wash.”

  This was the quick and clever Abbigail of whom Nicholas had grown so fond, making a joke of the least objectionable things about a thoroughly objec tionable man. A great peal of laughter almost escaped him as relief coursed through his body. But, conscious of being in Abbigail’s bedroom in his father’s house, he held himself to a low chuckle of pure pleasure. “Not to mention all those brown, snuff-scented kisses you would have to endure,” he teased back.

  Her curls shook off the notion. “Disgusting, Brother Blum.”

  He could not resist. “’Tis man’s nature.”

  She crossed her arms beneath her bosom once again, completely unaware of how lusciously they plumped up, inviting thoughts he’d been at great pains to repress since he had sneaked into her room.

  “You truly are a scoundrel, Brother Blum!”

  He knew it. But not such a one that he could leave her here without a word of caution.

  “Tomorrow with the Elders, Abbigail, remember. What happened between us in your room is not germane. You must not mention it. ‘Twould compromise your honor and ruin your reputation if in any way you blamed my foolish oversight on what we shared that night.”

  Her mouth primped into a pout of resistance. A pretty, kissable pout. He averted his gaze heavenward for the strength to resist it, to treat her with the respect a friend and Single Sister deserved.

  “Promise me, Abbigail. No word of your distress that evening. It does not figure in the watches’ disappearance.”

  She glared at him, her brown eyes black in the dim light.

  “Promise,” he insisted.

  “Very well then.”

  He was not the eldest of seven lively, slippery brothers and sisters for nothing. He knew weasel words when he heard them. “Not good enough, Abbigail. Repeat after me. ‘I promise not to implicate myself tomorrow.

  She drew herself up, indignant.

  He waited, admiring her resolve. “I know this trick. My sisters are even better at squirming out of promises than my brothers.”

  From a long way away, Samuel Ernst’s conch sounded the hour. It was four o’clock. He would begin another circuit of the town. Nicholas glanced at the narrow window, already gauging how little time he had to make a clean escape. “I must go, but not without your promise. Say it, Abbigail.”

  Her chin quivered, and she said, exhaling rapidly, “I promise not to implicate myself tomorrow.”

  He sighed with relief. He had extracted her promise, and it would keep her safe.

  “Bless you, Liebling,” he whispered, and bent his head to hers without so much as a thought to the impulse of his heart. Tenderly, he kissed her forehead, breathing in the delicate rosewater scent that clung to her wild curls, all he dared indulge.

  Then he turned to the window. It was still narrow, and he was still wide. Headfirst, he squeezed through, arms scraping the jamb. Behind him, his shirt snagged. His only decent shirt.

  “Zum Teufel,” he muttered in an undertone. He couldn’t afford to tear it. “Sister Till,” he quietly called for help.

  Bare feet padded softly toward him. “You don’t need another sister, Brother Blum!” she murmured at his ear, a puff of her warm sweet breath skittering down his neck and rousing a riot of sensation in his loins. “Hold still for just one moment,” she added.

  Her fingers picked at the small of his back.

  He pressed his lips together, clenched his teeth, and sucked in a full breath. He needed to go. He wanted to stay.

  A feather-light nudge, and she was done.

  “You’re free,” she said, and released him to the moonlight and the new disorder of his thoughts.

  21

  Scoundrel, charmer, thief in the night. Abbigad sank into her rocker, equal parts misery and relief. If she had doubted for a moment on the wagon road to Salem that this man owned her heart, she did not doubt it now. How could she be unmoved by his efforts to mask how much he hurt? How could she not defend him?

  How could she tell the truth and keep her promise too?

  She picked up her book, a volume of meditations in heavy black German script. Usually it put her straight to sleep. But not tonight. Before Nicholas had come, her eyes had merely skimmed the pages as worry for tomorrow droned in her mind. Now that he had come and gone, she could not make out words at all. She lay the book down and buried her head in her hands. The masculine, musky scent of him that lingered on them filled her nose and her lungs. Remnants of his energy crackled in the air.

  With a shudder of loss, she pulled her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs. Her body buzzed with unfulfilled desire.

  How right it seemed to have him in her bedroom. His bedroom. How hard to watch him leave. She squeezed herself with frustration. In Bethlehem after they had met in her bedroom, he had turned from her and rushed to rescue Catharina. Tonight he left her with a humbling peck of a kiss to her forehead, as if she were one of the twins. A
sister merely, or a friend.

  A sob of yearning caught in her chest. She wanted to be so much more to him. He made her laugh, laughed at her, with her. He was so full of life and loyalties. There was nothing halfhearted or mean-spirited about him. With him, the duty that knit her to her father unraveled.

  With Nicholas, she forgot that she was growing old and undesirable.

  What a goose of a girl she was at heart, she scolded. To think such thoughts, to harbor hope. She should learn from her experience. His marriage thwarted, Nicholas was free, but not for her. He wanted someone young and beautiful, someone like the vaunted Catharina to bear him children and adore him.

  For if Abbigail understood one thing about him, she understood this: Nicholas used his charm to garner adoration. And he reveled in it, whether the female who adored him be girl or wench or crone. Reveled in it, almost as much as she reveled in punching through that charm to the solid, worthy man beneath it. The man who wouldn’t let her reveal herself for his sake.

  Even if that might be his only way to save his skin.

  Her little candle sputtered and went out. She let it, preferring the warm quiet darkness, if only for a little while. Dawn, and Nicholas’s day of reckoning, would be here soon enough. Chasing sleep had proved a futile exercise. Miserable and sad, she sat there in the dark gathering all her resolution to defend him, come what may. She would not let her father triumph.

  From downstairs came the muted clank of pots and kettles. Retha Blum had risen well before dawn to stoke the hearth fire and start the morning meal. Abbigail tucked her unbound hair under a Haube, took up the skirts of her nightclothes and her wrapper, and went down to help, with one lowering thought.

  It would probably be the last useful thing she’d do for the Blum family today.

  Across town, Catharina Blum stirred from an uneasy sleep, opening her eyes to a gloomy dawn, wondering where she was. Not the Single Sisters House which was large and white and open, nor her cot in the dormitory surrounded by the peaceful sounds of girls and women sleeping.

  Here all was unfamiliar, cheerless, drab. A chink of window let in light. The table crouched in the middle of the room. The black hearth gaped against dark log walls. This cabin was Catharina’s home now, she instructed herself severely, and Matthias Blum her husband, for the rest of her life.

  Catharina Blum. She tested her new name. No better than yesterday. Whichever man she had married, her name would be the same. But she was not, and Matthias was not. Beside her, in their bed, he slept, his back to her, his breathing deep but quiet. Heat poured off him, warming the space between the sheets. Which they did not share, she thought painfully.

  After two nights of opportunity, they were virgins still. She pressed her lips together against an outcry of regret. Nicholas would not have spurned her. Nicholas, once her … Never mind that! she sternly told herself. Now he was her husband’s brother, and nothing more. Nicholas had no place in her heart or her marriage bed. But if Matthias kept his promise from their wedding night, she had no place here either.

  She would be a public bride but a secret virgin, scorned in her bed at night.

  Ver Flixe! Where was her gumption now? Fervently she prayed for patience and for faith.

  She repeated her wedding vows.

  She rehearsed her mother’s dictum: Learn to love him, in time she would.

  But would he learn? And, heaven help her, how? He was so distant, so controlled-except in this unguarded sleep.

  Perhaps the time was now. She took a deep breath for courage.

  Whoever said the bride had to lie idly by?

  Shyly she stretched her toes down toward his naked feet. They were far away. She had never felt delicate, but his sheer size made her feel feminine, womanly. The length of him. The strength of him. His stillness. As if he willed himself not to exist for her. But he did exist, his closeness charging her overwrought senses. Her gown had ridden up above her knees, and her shins grazed the rough hair on his calf.

  So private, so exposed. To her and her alone.

  A shiver of hope slid down her spine. Would he say no if she persisted in touching him, exploring him? She moved a hand toward his shoulder, turned as if to repel her, and found flesh. Her breath caught in her throat.

  He slept naked. Bare.

  Did she dare?

  Yes, she was a married woman, and this stubborn stranger was her mate.

  His upper arm made a ridge along the mountain of his body. She trailed her fingers along it, marveling at corded strength and length of bone and her freedom to possess them.

  He flinched and shifted.

  Toward her hand.

  She continued down to his forearm, finding the dark hair there softer than on his legs. Her fingers followed its course, curving around to an underside of soft, veined skin, supple as a lad’s, almost as delicate as her own.

  Her heart melted with tenderness for the man she married. The only man she had ever touched in law and with God’s good approval. In the dawning morning, her husband became real to her for the first time, less remote, more human. She was prepared, by covenant and in the secret reaches of her heart, to love every square inch of him. Growing bolder, she moved on to explore his wrist, fingers, knuckles, half hoping he was awake and knew, half hoping he would sleep.

  Suddenly he jerked away and shifted again, his legs and buttocks bumping into her as he sought a new position. She held her breath. He still slept.

  Her hand rested on his body. On, she guessed, his waist. What to do? Continue, for in truth, she did not want to stop, so immersed was she in the feel of him. She flattened her hand against the lean glide of his waist, letting its shape and silken texture fill her palm. She wanted to go farther down, craving to know more of the men’s secrets that Older Girls and Single Sisters spoke of in the dark. Barely skimming skin, she slid her hand around and forward to the front of him. Her fingertips met dense thick hair. His privacy. She stopped, her heart pounding at the daring she had mustered.

  What would he say? Awake, he would say no.

  Asleep, he let her have her way.

  Stretching deeper into the thick thatch of hair, she found what she instinctively sought, his manhood, rampant and wanting her in sleep, even tf only as a dream. With the pads of her fingers she searched the outline of his desire, her own pulse pounding loudly in her ears. He was smooth and hard and longer and thicker than she had imagined men could be, and deep inside her body, she yielded to the thought of accepting him, welcoming him, if only he would take her.

  He groaned, not from his throat but from the depths of his body. As if seeking her caress, his manhood pushed into her hand. Startled, she folded it around him, and he bolted up.

  “Catharina! Liebe Gott, stop!”

  She released him, the air cool to her palm where his heat had seared it. He rose from the bed and stood next to it, glaring at her in the pale dawn light that suffused the room. Glaring, and fabulously male, erect. He made no move to hide himself.

  She sat up on her knees, straightening her shift and her disordered hair, trembling in frustrated desire. “You want me,” she insisted.

  He shrugged angrily into his shirt “A man cannot help that.”

  “Let us be man and wife, Matthias, please.”

  His face, starkly handsome in the gray dawn light, tensed with pain. “Not while you love him,” he croaked. “Not while he loves you.”

  “’Twas not the same with him,” she said, her voice breaking on the sudden inescapable conclusion. She had not loved Nicholas like this. She had loved him as a girl loves, awed and adoring. With Matthias, she was prepared to love his whole body with her whole heart. She summoned her last ounce of gumption. Matthias must know what had just happened. “I feel for you … powerful … in my body … something I never felt before, for him or anyone.”

  Hope flashed in his eyes. In an instant, he masked it, reaching for his breeches and stepping into them in a quick fluid movement. Her blood pooled in her stomach. She did not wa
nt him clothed. She did not want him to go. She did not want this argument to stop.

  “You kissed me once,” she reminded him.

  “I won’t make that mistake again,” he said as if it had been poison.

  A thin, fierce anger threaded through her. “Matthias, our children. If we don’t kiss and do … the rest … how can we have children?”

  His back to her, he stuffed his shirt into his breeches, fumbled fiercely with his stock, then jammed his long arms into his vest and waistcoat. Finally he turned around, his handsome face still ravaged from the fight. “How, indeed? You could have thought of that before you consented to become my wife.”

  Oooh, he was maddeningly stubborn and unforgiving, this smartest of the Blums. But she had common sense, and she put it to work. She stepped off the bed and walked right up to him, relishing his height, his manliness. His stock was an angry mess. Careful not to smile, she took her time and straightened it, performing the tender office as her highest, her only wifely duty.

  “I know what you want, Matthias. I will reconcile you to it.” Barely needing to reach up, she kissed him as he had her, on his cheek. Then she said in the most routine manner she could manage, “I will see you at our midday meal.”

  His face set, he watched her sharply. “Perhaps. Today is my brother’s hearing.”

  It was not the note she wanted to end on. But it was the note he chose.

  22

  She must look like an owl, Abbigail thought after breakfast, dark circles ringing her eyes after her sleepless night. Bah! she admonished herself. What did it matter how a spinster Sister looked, today or any day? Even the day of Nicholas’s hearing, which started at nine o’clock.

  Peevish but resolute, her father had just limped up the street from the Tavern, hurrying her and Sister Benigna toward Gemeinhaus. He had insisted that they break fast with him-as if to help him strategize against the enemy. As if, Abbigail thought indignantly, spending another moment with the hospitable Blums might soften her heart and spoil his design.